Necropolis

by Santiago Gamboa

  She put her bag down on the table and said, I know who you are, you’re the writer, aren’t you? I saw you at the conference. I told her I had gone to the church to look for her but the Metropolitan’s secretary had said he did not know her and that there was no Jessica in his church, had she changed her name? No, she said, I asked them not to give out any information about me, that’s why, but why were you looking for me? why are you interested in Maturana? I told her there were things about José that I was trying to understand. I’m not an investigator or anything like that, nor am I, as Peters thought, planning a scandalous book, at least I don’t think so; it’s a very human story and for some strange reason I’d like to find out more, to get to the bottom of it, it just seems the right thing to do.

  They brought two coffees in big cups.

  Jessica looked at the steaming liquid with an anxious expression, and said, all right, all right, let me tell you a few things, you’re a writer and if you’re going to put this in one of your books it’s best you know what really happened, anyway, it’ll be better if I talk but don’t tell me you’re not going to do a book—I had been sincere, I did not know it yet—I’ve lived surrounded by people who say they won’t do this or they won’t do that, and then it’s the first thing they do, so don’t come to me with that.

  Having said this, she began her story.

  When he first arrived at the Ministry, José scared me. He was a tall, strong man, with a face pockmarked from smallpox or acne, swollen veins on his arms, bulging muscles, and those horrible lacerations he called tattoos, which he’d gotten in prison. If Walter was an angel who walked preceded by a ray of light, José was the king of shadows. Everything in him was an expression of evil, starting with his eyes. I had seen murderers, really perverse, cynical people, and I knew what was in a cold look like that. But Walter’s affection for him made me lower my guard. Maybe I was wrong, maybe José was like one of those mythological creatures who are all dried up but still have a few drops of life in them, and if somebody can extract those drops they revive, and I imagined that was what Walter had done.

  But it was Walter I felt most afraid for, not me. As I said before, I had seen it all, I’d swum all my life in turbulent, shark-infested waters. According to the story José told at the conference, Walter was a violent man who had beaten him up in the penitentiary and as a result of that he had found God. I heard this story many times and the truth was that in the cellblock, when José was pushed, he slipped and hit a hot water pipe, which not only knocked him out but also caused burns, because a nut on the pipe came loose and the water gushed out in a kind of geyser; I assume the mixture of all that led him to see God. Walter wasn’t capable of hitting anyone, let alone like that. He was an angel, as I said before. José, on the other hand, was a tough, violent individual. One day he confessed to me that he had killed a man with his bare hands, that he had never been brought to trial for it, and that it weighed on his conscience. He told me that on one of our excursions to spread the word, when Walter had asked us to work together. He mentioned it in his talk, a dive called the Flacuchenta Bar; of course the things he said about it I don’t remember that way at all. One night, he went to the bathrooms in that filthy place and when he came back he was very pale, and he said, did you see the face of the man who just came out of the bathroom? I hadn’t seen anyone, because I was listening to the music, and he said, oh, Jessica, it’s like a zombie movie, I just saw a dead man come out of the bathroom, you have to believe me, are you sure you didn’t see anyone? and I said, José, if there had been a dead man we would all have seen him, dead people attract attention, but he’d already stopped listening, he was just looking out at the street, very pale and very scared. Then he said, Jessica, that man who just came out of the bathroom is dead and I know because I killed him myself more than five years ago in Charleston. You killed somebody? I said, and he said, with a look of shame on his face, I don’t think he was a great loss to the human race, and I doubt that anyone mourned him, I killed him because he was hitting a woman who wouldn’t let herself be raped in a crack house, you know, one of those places where people go to do drugs; there are women who shoot up and then they’re anybody’s, but even in a place like that there are rules and if the woman shouts, you go away; usually they don’t even realize what they’re doing, but if they push you away you have to respect them, anyway, this man tried to have sex with this woman, this junkie, who had a crying baby next to her, and she resisted, so he started hitting her, but not the way a man hits a woman, with his open hand, but as if he was hitting a cop or another black guy as strong as him. I got up from my chair and grabbed him by the neck, and said, hey, nigger, are you so stubborn you haven’t noticed that she’s a woman? have you already forgotten that you wanted to have sex with her, which, even with a brain like yours, ought to tell you that she’s a woman? The guy tried to punch me, but I caught his hand in mid-air and squeezed it hard until I heard a couple of bones cracking, then I grabbed him by the hair, and before pushing him against a table, I said, you don’t treat a woman like that, let alone a mother, didn’t you see she has a child? I hit him a few times; when I picked him up to look at him he spat out a lump of blood, and I said, the next time I’ll fuck you myself, you son of a bitch, then I grabbed hold of his head and banged it against the wall about five times, as hard as I could; then I slammed it into the screen of a broken old TV set, which smashed into a thousand pieces, and I left him there, blood all over him, with his head stuck in an old TV. Then I walked out onto the street with the woman, who was pushing her stroller and rubbing her swollen cheekbones. I gave her some money so she could go away and that same afternoon I left the city for a while, but the police never came looking for me. One junkie less in the neighborhood, who gave a shit, but now I saw him in the bathroom, Jessica, and I thought, José, if you left him bleeding maybe he didn’t die, maybe that’s why the police never came looking for you.

  That was the kind of story that José told, but he also talked about private things, how he felt about other people, his love affairs. The first time he slept with a woman was with the mother of a neighbor of his, who was thirty-two and an alcoholic; he and his friend were eighteen and they smoked grass, drank, snorted cocaine, and occasionally gave themselves a fix. José had sex with her one day when he came looking for his friend but his friend had gone out; the woman was drunk, she invited him to have a few beers, then took him to bed and taught him what to do. Having sex with his friend’s mother made him feel like a big man, and very soon he was picking fights with everyone. He never saw the woman again. Then he was with a Colombian girl and got into more trouble with drugs, getting closer and closer to the edge, until he became a real addict and started his love affair with smack.

  Are you sure José didn’t know anything about his origins? He didn’t talk much about that, said Jessica, and it may be true; maybe he did have somebody in his childhood but prefers not to remember, like many people do, if something traumatic happened it’s better to distance yourself from it and invent a different story. He told me all kinds of stories; about an orphanage, a reformatory, an old woman who sold him, a man who forced him to beg with a plaster on his arm so that it looked as if he had a burn, and a group of children he used to steal fruit with from the trees in the neighbors’ gardens. In fact, José remembered a lot of things, but anyway, that’s beside the point, let me go back to what I want to tell you, which is the real relationship between José and Walter.

  It’s true that Walter took him out of prison and that he did it because he believed in him and realized that, with his physical strength and his experience in the lower depths, José would be his ideal companion in his crusade among prostitutes, drug addicts and murderers. He was his first companion, which explains why Walter was so loyal to him, why he was always prepared to indulge his demands, to support any of his ideas or whims, however crazy or even dangerous they were. In his talk, for example, José didn’t say anything about the Mobile Ministry, which was one of his b
rilliant ideas; it involved adapting a large RV, a very expensive one that cost a hundred and seventy thousand dollars, with a chapel inside, so that we could drive through the neighborhoods and spread the word more quickly. We bought it and had a prayer room, a little religious library, and a confessional built in it because José’s idea was to position ourselves on the corners in troubled neighborhoods and provide a service to the young people, instant confession and repentance.

  But his methods were very violent and one day, in a red-light district, he hit a young man who had refused to get down on his knees, and forced him to ask forgiveness of Christ, which the boy finally did but only when he was already bruised and bleeding. The next day, when José arrived in the RV, he was met with stones and even a couple of gunshots; he had to run away and the RV was torched. The insurance company didn’t want to hear about it, what was he doing in such a dangerous place anyway?

  The story about Jefferson and Walter being homosexuals is false, I really want to make that clear. I don’t have any proof, apart from my word, but I want you to understand that Walter was a creature from another world and sex didn’t interest him, either with women or with men, not that he had anything against it, on a number of occasions he said it was a healthy and necessary thing that should be practiced with joy, because God had given it to man precisely it order for him to be happy. But he was very ascetic. Denying himself pleasures was a form of holiness he aspired to, one that he wished for fervently, and that was his life; the parties in the tower and the way José described them, my God, I can’t imagine what José had in his head to imagine such things; there were young men around, yes, and they did meet in Walter’s rooms, not to have orgies but to talk and exchange experiences, Walter always wanted to know what real life was like, what happened beyond the walls of our chapel; those orgies happened only in José’s imagination, I can assure you; when I heard him I said to myself, why is he inventing all that? I have to admit it hurt me, not because of what he said about me, although that was quite disparaging, but I was never a saint and God knows that. It hurt me for another reason. We’d been very honest with each other those times when we’d talked at the Flacuchenta, I’d really opened up to him and told him a lot of things about my life, and he betrayed me. The “Miss Jessica” of his fantasies could only have been invented based on the things I’d confessed to him. As you know, the past is fragile, a very thin layer over the things that surround memory and sometimes give it meaning. But anyway, let’s go back to the beginning.

  As I was saying, those first years in the house, I’d lock myself in my room at nights and tremble at the thought that he might be aware of my fear, that he might smell it and come and harm me. Then I started to see him as someone lost in the fog, just as fragile as I was, and I started to feel a kind of affection, and let him get close to me. You’ll say I’m defending myself, but all I want to do is contradict what he said. You can think what you like. This is the truth, although I repeat, not everything he said about me is false, because he knew me well. It’s true I’d been one of the gang, that I’d mixed with good-looking young men who didn’t have any feelings. They didn’t know anything about love, their hearts were like baseball gloves that supplied dirty blood to their bodies. I was with them and loved them, and then I ran away, though the path I took was just as twisted as before, what else could I do, that was my world, my little world. People who’ve never been there will never understand, it’d be like trying to imagine the taste of a fruit we’ve never eaten.

  Miss Jessica was speaking slowly, and had stopped looking at me. It was hot and I thought to call to the waitress to bring us something cool, but I did nothing, I was afraid that any gesture from me would wake her from that hypnotic state. A number of questions were jostling in my head: had she spoken to José before his death? who did the plural refer to in that message, that mysterious we’ve found you? had she gone to the morgue to see the body? As I was thinking this, I noticed she was not wearing high heels but low shoes. Marta had mentioned the sound of high heels receding into the distance.

  You’re probably assuming I loved Walter to distraction. That’s what people usually say, isn’t it? My love was twofold, I loved him as a woman and as someone devoted to God, which I still am. Through him, I loved the dispossessed, people shipwrecked by life, who had never known love or affection, like me, like José too. For people like that, the heart becomes dry until it’s as hard as a coyote’s tooth or ground baked by the sun. The heart turns into pure silence. Walter made life spring up where before there was only dust and old bones, damage, hatred. That was why I loved him, but not José. José had something dark and terrifying inside him, a stain on his soul that sometimes appeared in his eyes. And I saw it right from the first day.

  That was why José betrayed him.

  I shouldn’t tell you this, but both are dead and very soon you and I will also be dead. I’m a woman who believes in and loves God, even though she has never seen Him, and if there’s one thing I know it’s that José was Walter’s Judas. José threw him to the sharks, he was the one who invented the stories that led to the downfall of the Ministry. Only he could have gotten into his tower with those young men and taken those absurd photographs while Walter wasn’t there. The incriminating photographs that turned the Ministry into a heap of ashes. When the first accusations were made, the police investigated and didn’t find anything, but then, as if by miracle, evidence came pouring in, all from boys identical to the ones José dealt with when he was spreading the word, don’t you find that too much of a coincidence? He instructed them, told them what to say, bought their affections, I don’t know with what, maybe with the Ministry’s own money, which was a horrible, disgusting thing to do, I’m sorry, a religious woman shouldn’t talk like that.

  Sometimes I ask myself, when exactly did José start to plan his betrayal? why did he betray him? what on earth did Walter ever do to him apart from drag him out of the gutter, give him his dignity, show him a path to follow, and provide him with a home? Great men are always betrayed by their disciples or their favorite sons, who are closer to the light, the light they want to have all to themselves, and if they can’t have it, they don’t want anyone to have it. They want it so much, they prefer to destroy it. This is what I believe happened: José wanted the whole logistical apparatus of the Ministry to disappear, he wanted Walter to again be a fragile young man treading the sidewalks of the world, with José by his side, protecting him, keeping the beasts off him, giving him warmth. I believe José betrayed Walter because he loved him.

  José talked about a fight that never took place in Moundsville, but what he did describe very well was that when he came to, they both wept. That image reduced me to tears: two men who had lost their way, suddenly realizing that something unites them, and that they will have to be together for the rest of their lives. That’s very beautiful, and it only happens to the disinherited. It happened to me, too. But then comes the rest of your life. What starts well gradually acquires a bitter taste until somebody goes crazy. And that’s because inside love, hate resides, a nasty animal waiting to hatch and take flight. That happened to José, and his wings never stopped growing. He wanted to take his revenge, but on what? He probably didn’t even know that himself.

  Walter’s fall had to mean that the crown would pass to José. Walter disappeared, and that was his victory. But you must be thinking, what kind of victory is it to spend the rest of your life wracked with guilt, constantly harking back to the paradise you destroyed, the paradise you lost through your own selfishness and hate? That’s how it was, José wanted to be Walter, to possess him completely, to be the only person who received his love, and in order to do that he had to destroy him. It wasn’t for the luxury or the money, in that at least José was a true follower of Christ.

  The one time I went into his cabin I realized how pure his hate was, and I said to myself, it is as devoid of greed and reasons as the blindest love, it is a clean uncontaminated hate. His hut was a bare space filled wi
th books, an easy chair, a stool, a writing table, a mattress, and nothing more, no decoration, no reminder of the beautiful things there were in the world, in the lives of the common people. Nothing at all. Only austerity and discipline. It was obvious that the person who lived there was concerned only with his own soul. A strange silence seemed to hover in the atmosphere. There were no mirrors, only a single light over the chair. José’s hatred for Walter is one of the purest, most uncontaminated things I’ve ever known. A motiveless hate that asks only to be exercised.

  As the afternoon wore on, it was becoming increasingly more humid, so I asked for a lemonade. The noises of the street seemed to be carried ever more clearly on the air: scraps of conversation, horns, cars accelerating. Jessica did not seem to hear them. She lit a cigarette and continued her story.

  José spent his days in his cabin in the garden, far from the everyday life of the house, and that protected him. It served his purposes. All that resentment would have been visible in the eyes, there’s no way you can hide something like that every minute of the day, but with him being at a distance we just didn’t see it. What happened in Colombia was another example. I don’t know if you remember. José mentioned a party at a hotel, when Walter was depressed and I gave them drugs. Well, I’ll tell you what really happened. It’s true that Walter was sad, but not because he’d turned into a prima donna, as José’s story suggested, but because he was genuinely hurt that his word was not being heard after so much effort and so much traveling, especially as, for him as for José, Latin America was the territory of his dreams. You can choose to believe me or not, but that night the drugs came out of José’s bag. Half a kilo of cocaine and three bundles of twenty-four crack cigarettes. The three of us drank and snorted. Remember, we were children of the streets, all that was part of our environment. It was the first time I’d seen Walter taking drugs, and I confess that the reason I did it was fear, fear of being left behind, abandoned, like someone running through a maze afraid to let go of the hand leading her. That night something took possession of us; I remember hearing some kind of construction work going on in the distance and feeling that I was being buried alive. That fear drove me to look for strength, just as it did them. It wasn’t a pleasant night, the fear didn’t go away, it was there in our words, in our glances, and, of course, in the silence. I stayed out on the balcony, in case they started fighting. We were on the twelfth floor and it wasn’t worth taking risks, anything was possible. They talked about the future of the Ministry. José said we should continue working in Latin America, expand, but Walter said no, better to carry on in our own territory, where we know what we’re doing, this attempt has been a lesson to us, we should listen to God, hear what He’s telling us through these failures. The same thing always happens when two men try to change the world: one prefers to stay within his own territory and the other wants to go out and knock down barriers; one of the two ends up badly, usually the one who goes outside, but in this case it was different because there was another element: resentment.